My client contracted with the vendor to get us training for Sybase PowerDesigner 9, which is the renamed and much-changed S-Designer. (I'm an old ERWin guy. Yeah, it's fairly broken, but I know where the brokenness is and how to work around it.)
The course instructor was actually pretty good. Knew his stuff, and introduced me to a few pretty nifty features in the product.
Yesterday the group stuck around after I left to work out some design issues in the model. This morning the client said I "may have to do some cleanup" because the instructor ran into some problems putting the changes in the model. The short story is that the model was completely F-U. The diagrams didn't relate back to the model objects. There were big blank squares with nothing in them. All the tables we cared about had been copied, with names changed from "foo" to "foo2". The copies were different, and I had to figure out which was the one to keep. Picky, tedious, unrewarding work.
After a whole day of having old versions of diagrams up side-by-side and clicking furiously around the product, I returned victorious from the swamp: I figured out what the instructor had wanted to do, and managed to actually make it work.
"And from this, he makes a living."
(That last part won't make sense if you don't know this joke: An old Jewish gentleman asks his son, "So what's all this I hear about Einstein and his relativity theory? What does it all mean?" The son replies, "Well, zayda, it's like this: Einstein says time is relative. If you're in the dentist chair getting your tooth pulled, a minute seems like an hour. But if you're talking to a pretty girl sitting in your lap, an hour seems like a minute." The old man thinks about this quietly for a minute. Then he asks, "And from this he makes a living?")
